It is emblematic that Twitter, a fundamental platform of political life in the era of populist rights, collapsed in the month in which both Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump suffered major defeats.
In two weeks, the singular Elon Musk provoked a wave of layoffs in the areas of security and privacy of his company and abolished what he said was the separation between “lords and peasants”, instituting a new policy of awarding the blue seal that distinguishes official accounts.
What followed was a week of reputational debacle with the falsification of profiles of public figures and companies. The departure of the big corporate sponsors, on which Twitter depends more than Meta or Google, has left, according to Musk himself, the company at risk of bankruptcy.
The story of Musk’s staggering $44 billion takeover of Twitter is the story of Musk himself, a brilliant engineer who tried to reinvent himself as a geopolitical actor.
After the start of the Ukrainian War, he took the confusion between real politics and digital activism to a paroxysm by putting one of his main technological services, Starlink, at the disposal of the Ukrainian Army and inventing a quack diplomacy of networks.
His conversations via Twitter with Kiev, Moscow, Beijing and Washington never came to anything. All that Musk has achieved is to become the hero of sociopaths and extremists, who take advantage of his “absolute conception of free speech” to perpetuate abuses and illegalities.
Musk’s rapprochement with Bolsonaro and Trump, whose candidates he endorsed in the last US midterm election, made the billionaire an easy target for regulators in democratic governments.
The Joe Biden administration has already recognized the need to assess whether Musk’s international connections could pose a threat to national security. In the European Union, who takes the place of Alexandre de Moraes is the powerful European Commissioner Thierry Breton. He has used Musk’s drift as an example to justify the regulatory package that forces platforms to resort to more transparent means in the fight against illegal content, incitement to hatred and attacks on electoral processes — they are subject to fines that can reach to 6% of the profits made in the EU.
Musk’s ideological crusade and Twitter’s administrative drift set in motion an irreversible process. In a few years, with or without crying, we will see social networks adhering to election time, with YouTube controlling the viewing time of its political channels, WhatsApp limiting message forwarding and a consortium of networks monitoring the virtual community.
This process was built on the initiative of the European Union, which leads the issue of regulation, and replicated in countries where democracy almost collapsed because of the instrumentalization of social networks by criminal forces. Twitter will be missed, but he was sacrificed for a good cause.
With a wealth of experience honed over 4+ years in journalism, I bring a seasoned voice to the world of news. Currently, I work as a freelance writer and editor, always seeking new opportunities to tell compelling stories in the field of world news.
